This is Brad Walker’s final blog piece reflecting on his career path that has spanned several countries, multiple non-profits, and a range of issues that have brought him to where he is today. We are grateful of the work he has done on behalf of MCE and wish him the best of luck!

For anyone who finds themselves drawn serendipitously or intentionally to environmental work, it is no secret that it can be discouraging.

In our political climate, which has grown increasingly hostile and corporatized, environmental activism often is reactive. We are immobilized to make change and proactively protect our planet because special interests have captured the very mechanisms of our democracy.

As the saying goes, we occasionally win the environmental battles but we are losing the war.

We cannot address environmental problems unless we have the foresight to address larger (and arguably more insidious) root causes – the relentless pursuit of profit over community health, the myth of unlimited growth, the corporatization of our public resources like clean water and air, and the buying and selling of our democracy.

The past few years have been difficult – we have seen unprecedented rollbacks in environmental protections, the widening of the wealth gap, and the spending of untold sums on political campaigns. But when I look to the future of our movement, Isee hope if all environmentalists would also become fervent defenders of democracy.

My second career path

I have had a very interesting and satisfying second career working on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) and more recently the the Missouri River, which has spanned over 11 years and three organizations. In retrospect it may have been pre-destined to happen.… Read the rest

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a vital tool MCE uses to request documents from the federal government related to its activities and our environment. MCE has made several FOIA requests related to the radioactive West Lake Landfill Superfund site in St. Louis County over many years, specifically to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We are happy to announce the EPA has released over 17,000 pages of draft reports and correspondence with the financially responsible parties.

Sometimes our requests for documents are denied for various reasons allowed by law, including what is known as the deliberative process. Records can be denied to a person or organization making a FOIA request if the documents requested are drafts or are being used for a forthcoming decision. The EPA used the deliberative process in 2014 as justification for not releasing a National Remedy Review Board assessment of West Lake Landfill that MCE requested using FOIA. The agency ultimately released the document in 2016. That’s why we are pleased the EPA has released over 17,000 pages of draft reports and correspondence with the financially responsible parties. The draft reports include two versions of the Remedial Investigation and one version of the Feasibility Study. The correspondence gives us insight as to where the EPA and responsible parties agree and disagree.… Read the rest

Over the last 40 years the average citizen’s income, security, education, health and prospects for their children’s future has eroded. It has become increasingly difficult to protect the environment and the rights of the majority of real people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in this country. During the same time, corporations have become more monopolistic, powerful, large, and politically influential. Is there a correlation to these diverging paths?

Figure 1: Convention Agenda and Attendance Pins

Between August 3 and 6, 2017 MCE staff members Caitlin Zera and Brad Walker attended a Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, MN along with hundreds of other people from across the country. This was the third such convention since 2011. Thirteen organizations convened the convention that was broken into eight topic conferences covering a wide range of topics: including Community and Worker Power, Democratizing the Constitution, Earth Rights & Global Democracy, Democratizing our Schools, Colleges & Universities, Media Democracy, Peace & Democracy, Racial Justice, and Voting Rights & Open Government. The underlying theme was how to address the increasing negative impact of overwhelming corporate influence on all layers of government. Over 140 presentations with 150 speakers were offered, typically on 75 minute tracks with ten concurrent presentations.

The one significant difficulty with the convention was that too many interesting topics were offered concurrently; meaning we had to chose to attend one presentation from up to ten topics we may have wanted to learn about. Presentations were not recorded so there is no opportunity to watch the ones that were missed.… Read the rest

I was fortunate to be invited to speak at a July 8, 2017 event at Central Print in St. Louis. It was organized to introduce a new river advocacy and resource book by Cole Williams, an author from St. Paul, MN. The book is titled Hear the River Dammed: Poems From the Edge of the Mississippi. Local author Dean Klinkenberg also read from his Frank Dodge mystery series. Below is the text of my short talk.

By Brad Walker, Rivers Director July 12, 2017

The Upper Mississippi River is an icon, but its image is misleading and distorted.

We like to think of the river as a tamed immortal giant constantly rolling past us, its history providing us with nostalgic stories.

The reality is something quite different.

The river is actually highly altered and degraded primarily due to two major activities:

Damming and channeling the river for barges.

Disconnecting the floodplains from the river for industrial agriculture.

The result today is a river that is not recreation-friendly, is increasingly devoid of native species, and is more flood-prone.… Read the rest

The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card was recently released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and a cursory review leaves me to wonder, who is editing this thing? Is anyone looking critically at making sure investment recommendations are worthwhile and in the public interest? Much of our nation’s infrastructure was built during the 1930s New Deal as part of a grand vision to build dams, roads and bridges. While those federal investments are credited at least with bringing the nation out of the Depression, some of those investments have caused unacceptable environmental damages, like the dams that block migrating salmon. Infrastructure today needs a new vision that focuses on building a more sustainable future, like high speed rail, functional mass transit and renewable energy. Unfortunately, the ASCE is stuck in the 20th century as it evaluates the nation’s infrastructure.

“ASCE and its members are dedicated to ensuring a sustainable future in which human society has the capacity and opportunity to maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely, without degrading the quantity, quality or the availability of natural, economic and social resources.”

Obviously, the statement is a legitimate and encompasses many of the basic components of sustainability. However, as many growth-oriented organizations ignore, there is no consideration of what specific physical and biologic needs and how much of them are essential to “maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely.”

The ASCE uses its Report Card to quantify how much it would cost to repair existing system or expand them, but there is no questioning of whether all of the existing infrastructure systems are actually providing public value or even have the potential of being sustainable. The overarching philosophy is to maintain these systems without looking beyond them to fundamental changes in how the systems work or don’t work in providing their intended benefit, which is not corporate profits.

This is especially true of the Inland Waterways System (IWS), which is the most subsidized commodity transport system in the U.S. and a system that has highly damaged one of the most diverse, productive and rare habitats that exists – rivers and floodplains.

There is a fundamental problem with this ASCE Report Card regarding the IWS, which is strongly based on the U.S.… Read the rest

After a century of recklessly damaging our rivers — far too often for little public benefit, one would hope that we would have learned some lessons. One of them should be that we would make it easier to restore our rivers than it is to further damage them. The committee structures intended to provide specific recommendations on river management that our lawmakers enacted, unfortunately, have produced the opposite result.

In 1986 Congress gave the barge industry special interests a committee that, by its design, can easily agree on industry-favorable recommendations for further development of barge navigation. In contrast, river restoration advocates were saddled with a conflict-ridden, oversized committee that by its design is unlikely to agree on river restoration recommendations of any significance.

Congress has the ability to create committees and boards that are tasked with providing stakeholder recommendations and guidance to government agencies to help the agencies perform their duties. This article will compare two of those entities that were created to provide recommendations and guidance to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) regarding the Corps management of our rivers.

Introduction

The Inland Waterways System (IWS) is an industrialized version of what were once America’s natural major rivers. Congress authorized and funded massive alterations of the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Columbia, and other major rivers to accommodate nine-foot draft barges to be pushed up and down our rivers, typically by channelizing and/or damming the rivers. There are about 12,000 official miles within the IWS, all of the natural portions severely degraded by the alterations. The map in Figure 1 below shows the rivers and coastal areas that are a part of the IWS in blue lines and the ports on the rivers in yellow dots.

Figure 1: Coastal and Inland Waterway System

Since the vast majority of commodities transported on the IWS are shipped on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR), Illinois River, Ohio River and/or Lower Mississippi River, I will limit all detailed discussions on those four rivers. Table 1 below compares barge traffic volumes, appropriations and estimated Inland Waterways Trust Fund receipts for 2014 on those segments of the IWS. This table allows us to dig deeper into the cost and use of each of these segments of the IWS so that we can better evaluate the use of taxpayer dollars and weigh the benefits to society of the IWS, the industries it serves, and the materials it transports.… Read the rest

The Politics of the Missouri River

In December 2015, 20 members of Congress from the Missouri River Basin signed a letter discouraging the Army Corps of Engineers from fully pursuing legally required, long-planned efforts to include habitat recovery into river management. Whether from ignorance or bias towards special interests, they are interfering in the Corps’ efforts to carry out Congress’ own laws. In the 1980s, Congress wisely began an effort to restore a significant portion of the highly altered Missouri River floodplain and return to the public the benefits of a connected floodplain. Unfortunately, the congressional letter promotes an abandonment of that effort and a break in the public trust. The wasteful and dangerous position taken in the letter puts the general public at risk and continues the trend of squandering their hard-earned income to “protect” special interests who have exploited the river exclusively for their benefit for decades.

After spending billions of dollars since the 1940s on flood control, dams, levees, maintenance, and flood clean-up, the Missouri River floods even worse than before the river was altered. In altering our river, we’ve lost the ecosystem services that a natural river system provides us, such as flood storage, water filtration, wildlife habitat, and recreation.

The Missouri River System was built in an era of big dams and levees, motivated by the erroneous belief that engineering could overcome nature. Ironically, this (mis)management of the river has resulted in increased and more catastrophic flooding, extensive loss of biodiversity, and a river that flows too fast for barge traffic. Government projects that favored floodplain landowners and the barge industry have resulted in a highly degraded ecosystem and the loss of the vast majority of floodplains all along the Missouri River.

Our primary legal basis for challenging the status quo and promoting river restoration is the Environmental Species Act, which is often in direct odds with flood control laws that have propped up the barge industry and protected floodplain farmers. So far, environmental legal challenges have failed – the courts pointed back to Congress to resolve the conflicting laws.

We lose over $2 billion annually in benefits that had been provided by the floodplain and river habitat.

The Politics of the Missouri River

The Letter

On December 17, 2015, 20 members of Congress from the Missouri River Basin, six senators and 14 representatives, sent a very pointed letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Army, urging restrictions on the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that could significantly limit their options in complying with the Endangered Species Act in the Missouri River. Essentially, this request, if strictly complied with, would likely place endangered species in jeopardy.

The letter represents a problematic response by members of Congress to the earnest and legally required attempts by government agencies to comply with laws that Congress itself has written. Unfortunately, this letter is a clear indication that members of Congress are being influenced by anti-environmental and heavily subsidized special interests to the detriment of the general public and future generations.

For the last 30 years, the Corps and USFWS have intertwined in an effort to fix the many significant problems caused by construction of the congressionally authorized Missouri River Bank Stabilization & Navigation Project (BSNP). The BSNP turned the lower Missouri River into an ineffective and environmentally damaging barge canal that had cost taxpayers over $750 million to build and maintain as of 1980, per the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Report of the Chief of Engineers (See Tables 20-1 and 21-A). Ongoing maintenance and restoration costs have added hundreds of millions of dollars to the total cost.

Background and History

Damming and Channelizing the Missouri River

The Missouri River had been known for centuries to flood frequently and ruthlessly, as is its nature. Regrettably, most stakeholders have refused to accept this fact, attracted by the flat and fertile floodplains created by the frequent flooding, and so floodplain farmers and industry have developed along almost the entire lower Missouri River. The government has promoted this development for economic purposes, without really considering all the negative ramifications.

After failing to construct a 6-foot deep channel during the early part of the 20th century and attempting to deal with the impacts of numerous floods, a compromise scheme was authorized by Congress through the Flood Control Act of 1944 called the Pick-Sloan Plan.… Read the rest

Our Upper Mississippi River landscape is replete with threatened and endangered species. This article is going to introduce you to one vulnerable species that you probably are unaware of — but none the less needs your help.

In August 2016 the 30th anniversary of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) program, formerly the Environmental Management Program was celebrated. The UMRR is a concession by Congress dating back to the 1986 Water Resources Development Act, primarily resulting from the battle over the construction of the Melvin Price Locks & Dam at Alton, Illinois. This history was chronicled in a Missouri Coalition for the Environment article titled The Dam That Was Too Big to Hide and is a true advocacy success story. Since 1986 much has been learned by the experts who have worked on the UMRR program, and there have been over 50 projects completed, and according to the Corps, the program has positively affected more than 100,000 acres of land in and adjacent to the UMR. But the river’s overall health has not really improved because the UMRR program is too small in scope and funding, and the major stressors — barge navigation and industrial agriculture — remain unabated.

However, this article is not about the UMRR program; it is about my concern for an endangered species that will never be listed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. It is the advocates that have worked against all odds to reform the Corps’ management of the river by focusing upon the first stressor listed above — barge navigation. Over the last more than eight decades the construction and maintenance of barge navigation infrastructure, as well as the direct actions of using nine-foot deep draft barges, have had significant negative effects upon the river environment and the costs of the system are nearly completely funded by the taxpayers. I am one of a relatively small group of people working to reform river navigation, almost all of who are members of the Nicollet Island Coalition (NIC).… Read the rest

Admit it, if you’ve ever seen it you’ve thought about being on The Daily Show. So have I. So on December 1, 2015, when I received an email from a person claiming to be from the show saying they wanted to do a field piece about questionable projects undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers, alarms immediately went off in my cynical brain and I wondered who was scamming me. After a bit of investigation, we were leaning towards this inquiry being legitimate.